Year: 2011

Hello everybody, check out this amazing film done by Drew Christie. Its an animated interpretation of John Cohen’s first meeting with Harry Smith, the experimental filmmaker and animator who compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music on the Folkways label, probably the most influential collection of American Folk Music. Done for Greg Vandy’s American Standard Time blog.

Here’s a wonderful clip of a speech made by the great American comedian, cowboy and commentator Will Rogers about the state of the nation in the 1931, The Great Depression. He could make the same speech today.

The Dust Busters are heading out on tour again, this time to the great states of Ohio and Kentucky! We will be on tour from Nov. 15th – Nov. 20th, all the dates are below. We are pleased and honored to be performing at To Sing With You Once More: A musical memorial benefiting the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation and the Mike Seeger Scholarship Fund.This concert was organized my Michael Oberst of The Tillers, one of our very favorite bands! It is a tribute to the music and work of Mike Seeger.

Just wanted to let you know that I have put together a concert to benefit the Occupy Wall Street movement. Its gonna be a great show! The show is set to take place at Brooklyn’s own Jalopy Theater on Sunday Nov. 13th. The show starts at 7pm and will feature a number of great bands and performers! (Including my own band The Dust Busters…) The complete list of performers and schedule plus all other relevant info is below.

All proceeds from this concert will benefit the Occupy Wall St. movement.

Hope to see you there! All the best,

Eli

Venue:The Jalopy Theater, 315 Columbia St. in Brooklyn in Carroll Gardens/Redhook area. Their website is . F train to the Caroll St. stop.
Date and Time: 7pm till whenever on Sunday Nov. 13th

Check out the event page on:

Schedule of Bands:

7pm Gregory Nissen – pianist, composer and part of the OWS Arts & Culture Working Group.

11:45pm Tik Tok – original songs from Berlin and New York – guitar and banjo, ” sounds like tin pans and chicken bones.”

Tickets are available at the door or by calling the Jalopy Theater at (718) 395-3214. Ticket price is $10, all proceeds go towards the Occupy Wall St. movement. The Jalopy Theater serves beer, wine, tea and coffee.

Hello everybody, just letting you know about the upcoming Washington Square Park Folk Festival. I got hired by the Parks Department to produce the first ever folk festival in Washington Square Park. Gonna be fun!

The festival is FREE and open to the public!

Its gonna be an excellent two days of music, with 9 of my very favorite groups (including my own) gracing the stage and myself on hand to serve as your MC. Hope to see you there!

2011 also marks the 50th anniversary of the 1961 “Washington Square Folk Music Riot” when the City tried to revoke the permit for folk musicians to play and sing on Sundays in the park. They needed to clear undesirable people out so that they could satisfy local real estate interests and I heard possibly enact a crazy plan to extend 5th ave. through the park! Luckily folkies resisted the attempt by the police to kick them out of their public space, resulting in the “riot,” and the planned extension of 5th ave never materialized. There’s been a film made about the “riot” and the film will be screened at the festival and is also posted below for convenient viewing…

Today we mourn the loss of David “Honeyboy” Edwards, one of the greatest blues musicians there ever was. Honeyboy was an incredible talent in his guitar playing, singing, songwriting and also with his rack harmonica playing (see his 1979 Folkways album, “Mississippi Delta Bluesman” as well as his very first recordings made by Alan Lomax in Clarkesdale, MS, 1942, among many others.) Honeyboy was not only an amazing artist but also through his longevity became the last living link to the world of the old Deep South that created the Folk-Blues. That world was a small world, and many of the people that created the blues knew one another. Honeyboy counted as friends and musical associates Big Joe Williams, Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, The Memphis Jugband and others and undoubtedly ranked among them as one of blues music’s great practitioners. With his passing the kind of deep feeling and subtle mode of expression that he lived and breathed in his music leaves the world a diminished place.

On today’s show we revisit my extended interview with Honeyboy which we recorded when he came to play at BB King’s club in New York in 2006. I picked up Honeyboy and his manager and harmonica player Michael Frank at La Guardia Airport and drove them back to Michael’s brothers house on the Upper West Side. Once there we relaxed in the living room and Honeyboy and I recorded this interview. He was easygoing and easy to talk with and very generous with his time to speak with me, just a kid. I knew Honeyboy and Michael from when I had booked them a couple of years before to play at the Oberlin College Folk Festival and felt lucky to be able to reconnect with them in New York.

In this interview Honeyboy reveals many fascinating insights, vignettes and critical information gathered during his 80+ years as a professional musician. He talks about his days playing in Memphis with the Memphis Jug Band (plus how to blow a jug and build a tub bass) and Big Walter Horton, living and playing in the Mississippi Delta and then Chicago with all the greats there, how to hop a 1930’s freight train and get away with it as well as lots more.

I used the interview as a chance also to play a number of my favorite recordings by Honeyboy, as well as recordings by many of his musical associates he mentions, to give listeners not already familiar with his work and milieu a better understanding of his life and music.

For a brief account of his extraordinary life, see the below obituary from the New York Times. For more I highly recommend his autobiography The World Don’t Owe Me Nothin’ and the excellent documentary film about his life, “Honeyboy.”

David Honeyboy Edwards, believed to have been the oldest surviving member of the first generation of Delta blues singers, died on Monday at his home in Chicago. He was 96.

His death was announced by his manager, Michael Frank.

Mr. Edwards’s career spanned nearly the entire recorded history of the blues, from its early years in the Mississippi Delta to its migration to the nightclubs of Chicago and its emergence as an international phenomenon.

Over eight decades Mr. Edwards knew or played with virtually every major figure who worked in the idiom, including Charley Patton, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. He was probably best known, though, as the last living link to Robert Johnson, widely hailed as the King of the Delta Blues. The two traveled together, performing on street corners and at picnics, dances and fish fries during the 1930s.

“We would walk through the country with our guitars on our shoulders, stop at people’s houses, play a little music, walk on,” Mr. Edwards said in an interview with the blues historian Robert Palmer, recalling his peripatetic years with Johnson. “We could hitchhike, transfer from truck to truck, or, if we couldn’t catch one of them, we’d go to the train yard, ’cause the railroad was all through that part of the country then.” He added, “Man, we played for a lot of peoples.”

Mr. Edwards had earlier apprenticed with the country bluesman Big Joe Williams. Unlike Williams and many of his other peers, however, Mr. Edwards did not record commercially until after World War II. Field recordings he made for the Library of Congress under the supervision of the folklorist Alan Lomax in 1942 are the only documents of Mr. Edwards’s music from his years in the Delta.

Citing the interplay between his coarse, keening vocals and his syncopated “talking” guitar on recordings like “Wind Howling Blues,” many historians regard these performances as classic examples of the deep, down-home blues that shaped rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll.

Mr. Edwards was especially renowned for his intricate fingerpicking and his slashing bottleneck-slide guitar work. Though he played in much the same traditional style throughout his career, he also enjoyed the distinction of being one of the first Delta blues musicians to perform with a saxophonist and drummer.

David Edwards was born June 28, 1915, in Shaw, Miss., in the Delta region. His parents, who worked as sharecroppers, gave him the nickname Honey, which later became Honeyboy. His mother played the guitar; his father, a fiddler and guitarist, performed at local social events. Mr. Edwards’s father bought him his first guitar and taught him to play traditional folk ballads.

His first real exposure to the blues came in 1929, when the celebrated country bluesman Tommy Johnson came to pick cotton at Wildwood Plantation, the farm near Greenwood where the Edwards family lived at the time.

Here’ s a wonderful film made by KEXP DJ Greg Vandy and filmmaker Drew Christie in Seattle Washington, interviewing John Cohen, legendary photographer, film maker and musician. I was out on tour on the West Coast with John and my old time string band The Dust Busters in February, we met up with Greg in Seattle, our fiddler Craig Judelman was able to make arrangements with Greg for filming and it all worked out! This film was originally posted on Greg’s website American Standard Time, an awesome site, well worth checking out. Also check out Greg’s radio show The Road House on KEXP radio in Seattle, WA. Thanks to Greg and Drew for making this very well done and informative film.

Here’s the blurb for the film from the American Standard Time site:

“While mainly known as a founding member of the seminal folk revival group The New Lost City Ramblers, John Cohen is also a musicologist, photographer and filmmaker who is responsible for the documentation and recording of many great appalachian musicians such as Roscoe Holcomb, Dillard Chandler, EC Ball, Frank Proffitt, and Wade Ward among many others. John was photographing Bob Dylan and the Beats in New York in the late 50’s and early 60’s as well as producing and directing the legendary film The High Lonesome Sound. KEXP DJ Greg Vandy and filmmaker Drew Christie interviewed John about many of these topics and this short documentary is the result. The interview spanned 2 hours so much was left out of this cut, however, there will be an animated installment of the interview pertaining to John meeting the infamous Harry Smith- so keep your eyes peeled.”

There’s a great new interview/radio broadcast out with record collector and musician Pat Conte, as interviewed by John Heneghan for his excellent internet radio show, “John’s Old Time Radio Show.” Conte talks about his years of record collecting and plays treasures from his collection. Great interview, great show!

I should also note that Pat Conte is an amazing musician on banjo, fiddle and guitar. He has a new album out, it’s great!

The first album released by Jalopy Records in an edition of 500 red vinyl copies with liner notes insert.

“The Jalopy Theatre and School of Music proudly presents Pat Conte in the release of ‘American Songs with Fiddle and Banjo,’ the debut album of the brand new label, Jalopy Records. Pat Conte, a longtime musician and collector of world folk music (producer of The Secret Museum of Mankind series on Yazoo Records) has put together fourteen tunes, specifically arranged for the fiddle and banjo. The record spans old-time, primitive blues and archaic songs to celebrate the harmonious and traditional pairing of these instruments in American music. … Conte has performed with dozens of bands, most notably The Otis Brothers, Major Contay and the Canebrake Rattlers and The Empire State String Ticklers.” – Jalopy

Down Home Radio host Eli Smith is proud to announce the 3rd annual Brooklyn Folk Festival, to be held at the Jalopy Theater and Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition in Brooklyn, NY – Friday, June 10th- Sunday, June 12th, 2011. The festival will feature the best young talent from Brooklyn’s exploding folk music scene as well as luminaries from the generation that made the 1960’s New York City folk music revival. The music featured will include traditional styles such as old-time string band music, blues, jug band music, traditional music of Mexico, the Balkans, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and West Africa, local author-vocalists and more! There will be concerts throughout the day as well as workshops on various musical styles, film screenings and a Sunday afternoon square dance! This year will also inaugurate the Brooklyn Folk Festival “Banjo Toss.” The person who throws a banjo the farthest will win a free banjo!

The festival will feature 35+ bands including luminaries such as Grammy Award winner Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders and Pat Conte of the Canebrake Rattlers and Secret Museum of Mankind, two of the main creators of the 1960’s folk music scene in Greenwhich Village, but will also feature young Brooklyn based talents such as The Dust Busters, acclaimed blues musician Blind Boy Paxton, ballad singer Elizabeth Butters, Country singer Alex Battles, songster Feral Foster, Hubby Jenkins of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and many more. Radio Jarocho, a Mexican folk music collective will perform a variety of styles of music and dance from across Mexico. Clifton Hicks of Boone, North Carolina will be making a second appearance at the festival following his debut last year, playing his style of traditional banjo music of the Southern Appalachian mountains. The Brooklyn Folk Festival seeks to exhibit the cultural contributions from a diversity of Brooklyn communities, and in particular seeks to highlight the young talent emerging from those communities.

Come down to The Brooklyn Folk Festival in Redhook Brooklyn over the weekend Friday, June 10th- Sunday, June 12th to hear Brooklyn’s best traditional Folk musicians and song writers. You will hear banjos, fiddles, mandolins, guitars, people blowing on jugs and harmonicas, a world champion whistler as well as great original songs. If you want to learn how to play, come down to the afternoon instrumental workshops. The festival costs $20 per day or $55 for 3 days, including the afternoon workshops and film screenings!

Friday’s show will be held at the Jalopy Theater and then, due to the huge crowds at last year’s event, the Saturday and Sunday activities will take place at a larger venue, The Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition.